- Low-hanging Fruit by SuperVinoBros
- Posts
- Chablis as the Centerpiece: What’s So Special About This Part of France, a Few Days of Bottle Shares, and a Defining Producer of the Region
Chablis as the Centerpiece: What’s So Special About This Part of France, a Few Days of Bottle Shares, and a Defining Producer of the Region
Super Vino Bros
June 25, 2025
Hey guys!
This week’s newsletter is all about Chablis, a region I’ve always loved, but one that really was the theme over the past few days. Between a birthday party where everyone brought a bottle and a cozy dinner in Brooklyn Heights, it felt like the perfect time to revisit what makes this corner of Burgundy so compelling. We’re diving into the region, highlighting a few standout producers, and sharing some moments that reminded me why wine, at its best, is really just about sharing something you care about with the people around you. Enjoy 🙏
An Intro to Chablis: Chardonnay from the Edge of Burgundy 🇫🇷
Cooler climate, fossil-rich soils, and wines that feel like biting into a green apple.
When most people think of Chardonnay, they picture the rich, buttery styles of California or the prestige of the Côte de Beaune. But head way north, almost to the edge of Burgundy, and you’ll find Chablis: a region that offers a radically different take on the grape.
Pictured: Map of Burgundy, Image by Wine Folly
Chablis was one of the first places that made me really get Chardonnay. It’s fresh, stripped-down, and built on tension. The region sits closer to Champagne than to the heart of Burgundy, and you can feel it in the wines. The climate is cooler and windier, with a longer growing season that helps preserve acidity. The soils, mostly Kimmeridgian limestone packed with fossilized seashells, give the wines a signature chalky, saline quality. They taste like green apple, lemon zest, and wet stone, with a mouthwatering acidity that feels like you’re biting into a lemon (in the best way).
Pictured: Chablis Wine Region, Image by Wine-searcher
Most Chablis is made with little to no oak, which keeps things bright, linear, and lively. In my opinion, it’s Chardonnay in its most transparent form. Like other regions, the wines follow a hierarchy, Petit Chablis, Chablis, Premier Cru, and Grand Cru, each level bringing more depth and age worthiness. But honestly, you don’t need to chase Grand Cru to find some gems. Some of the most compelling wines I’ve ever had have come from this region, from producers that are relatively reasonable to access. If you need a place to start, check out producers like Alice & Olivier De Moor, Thomas Pico, and Château de Béru.
A Weekend with Friends (and A Lot of Chablis) 🥂
Two days of good bottles, shared meals, and extreme generosity
I’ve been thinking a lot about Chablis lately, not just because it’s a fascinating region, but because the past couple of days unintentionally turned into a celebration of it. On Sunday, a friend hosted a birthday party with one simple rule: bring a bottle of Chablis. And people were ready. Friends showed up with bottles they’d been saving, wines with personal stories, and a few cuvées you’d usually only find on a restaurant list. I even got to try Domaine Raveneau for the first time, a producer that’s basically the gold standard for Chablis.
Pictured: Domaine Raveneau Petit Chablis
The next night, my friend Jon put together a dinner at Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights. A small group of us packed into the private dining room and spent the night passing plates, telling stories, and opening bottles. The wines came from all over, different regions, different styles, but again, it was the Chablis that kept pulling everyone’s focus. There’s something about the energy of those wines that brought me back over and over. Some of the standouts for me were magnums from Moreau-Naudet and Château de Béru.
Pictured: Moreau-Naudet Magnums
As good as the wines were, what really stuck with me was how naturally people wanted to share them. Across both days, everyone brought something they cared about and genuinely wanted others to experience. Chablis was the thread that tied the two nights together, but the heart of it was community, friends creating something together through what they chose to open, pour, and talk about. It was all a reminder that the best wine moments aren’t about prestige or rarity, they’re about generosity, curiosity, and the people around the table.
Pictured: Ingas Bar in Brooklyn Heights
Big thanks to my friends Jon and Lanre, and to everyone who made the past few days so special.
Producer Highlight ⭐️
One of our favorite parts of wine is the discovery: we’re constantly being put on to new regions, producers, and cuvées from our friends. We’ll never be able to try EVERY wine, but we want to take a moment to mention some producers that excite us!
Alice and Olivier De Moor 🍷
Location: Chablis, Burgundy, France 📍
In the hilltop village of Courgis, just southwest of Chablis, Alice and Olivier De Moor have built one of the most established domaines in Burgundy. Olivier was born here, and still works in a cellar beneath his grandparents’ house; Alice is from the Jura, and the two met while working at a large Chablis estate, both trained enologists who quickly realized they wanted to take a different path. From the start, they rejected the region’s obsession with volume and control in favor of something slower and more intimate. They planted their first vines in 1989, leased historic parcels a few years later, and for a long time made ends meet by tending the vines of others while building their own project.
Pictured: Olivier and Alice De Moor. Photo by Littlewine.io
They’ve worked organically since 2005, an anomaly in Chablis, and treat each step of the process, harvest, pressing, élevage, with the same restraint they bring to the vines. They abandoned large harvest bins early on, favor small boxes to protect the fruit, and designed their cellar so everything could be done by gravity rather than pump. There's no sulfur used at harvest or during fermentation, yet the wines remain clean and composed. For Alice and Olivier, purity doesn’t mean precision, it means honesty. They aren’t chasing consistency across vintages; they’re chasing truth in them. Their work reflects a belief that great wine comes less from control than from careful attention: observing how a site reacts to weather, how a vine responds to stress, and knowing when to intervene, and more importantly, when not to.
Pictured: Alice and Olivier De Moor. Image by Bowler Wine
Though Olivier is mostly in the vines and Alice primarily in the cellar and office, their approach is deeply collaborative, with no decisions made alone. Their philosophy is rooted in humility and patience, shaped as much by the land as by the quiet refusal to do things the easy way. They’ve resisted trends and outside pressure, grown their domaine slowly, and built a life around observation, conversation, and care. Their wines are just the result.
Pictured: De Moor Bel-Air et Clardy Chablis
I wanted to highlight Alice and Olivier De Moor for one simple reason: they’re my favorite Chablis producer. Over the past few days, bottles of De Moor kept showing up, and they were always the first to be emptied. I think that says something. If you come across a bottle, absolutely pick it up. The wines are special.
Bonus - Wine Fair News:
If any of you are in the New Jersey area and looking for plans this weekend, there’s a natural wine fair happening in Maplewood on Sunday, June 29th! Link for the tickets are here:
That’s it for this week! Hope this inspires some of you to drink some Chablis sometime soon, and please let me know if you do. Thanks so much for reading along and, as always, drink responsibly 🥂